Friday, April 20, 2018

How Compassion Can Make You More Successful

I had a moment in the Library of Congress among the presidential papers. I opened a folder, and there was an envelope in it. The front of the envelope was facing the table, so I didn't know what was in it. I opened it and out spilled all this hair. I turned the envelop over and it says, 'Clipped from President Garfield's head on his deathbed.'
~ Candice Millard

Our fate, like the fate of all species, is determined by chance, by circumstance, and by grace.

For Hannah Arendt, thinking was a form of political engagement. She didn't just want to find a place for herself in the world. She wanted to change it...  Like Jen Harwood Great Jeneration

The true story is always the oppositional story. Or so goes the logic of both literature professors and the right-wing media. What have the radical politics of humanities professors wrought?... Coldest River on Earth

We express our emotions physically, but now we mediate them digitally as well. As Don DeLillo put it, “Nobody knows how to feel and they’re checking around for hints”...  Emotional Intelligence and Other Pella Greenish Hints

Westpac slow to report adviser despite 'serious misconduct' concerns

ACT police officers on trial over alleged assault, cover-up


Neuroscience, social science, and history give us radically different ways of approaching empathy. But is empathy a moral force? ...  Shibboleth and  Media Dragon 

“At the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, we know that solving the mystery of enduring behavior change offers an enormous opportunity to improve lives. We unite an interdisciplinary team of scientists with leading practitioners in education, healthcare, and consumer financial services, all of whom seek to address the question: How can we make behavior change stick?…We are developing an interactive digital platform to improve daily decisions about health, education, and savings. For the first time, a world-class team of scientific experts will be able to continually test and improve a behavior change program by seamlessly incorporating the latest insights from their research into massive random-assignment experiments. Their interactive digital platform seeks to improve daily health, education, and savings decisions of millions…” 

From controlling to empowering: Five practices for building ...

Common traits of strong leaders

 

10 Steps to Building an Impeccable Professional Reputation


Reviving a demoralised workforce at the UK’s Serious Fraud Office FT


Finding the one: An accountant love story for Tax Day 

A millionaire who buried treasure in the Rockies has offered one main clue


The poem is also called "The Thrill of the Chase." You can google it, but the website is not responding just now. Wonder why? 

 

 Award-winning reporters realized their work was bigger than themselves

Perspective.
That’s what Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey brought to their colleagues Monday afternoon, when their unmasking of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment shared American journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
“This might seem strange to say, but two of the people we’re closest to in the world have no idea who Harvey Weinstein is, and they don’t know a thing about our reporting on him,” Kantor began.
That would be their daughters, Violet and Mira, both under 2 years old.
When they are older, they will tell them, Kantor said, of other women who were victimized — and how they wanted to give those and other women “a mountain of evidence to stand on: documents, internal emails, settlement records, human resources reports.”
Twohey said they want to tell their daughters someday that “the two of us, and all of the other reporters around the country who worked on these kinds of stories, did so with the hope that girls your age will know nothing but dignity and decency in the workplace and beyond.”
Here is their entire speech, which includes their thanks to the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow, who conducted his own investigation, also endured threats and legal challenges — and on Monday, joined them in the Pulitzer spotlight.
It was a description of the type of journalism rewarded Monday. One award cited staffers laboring to get a paper how while fire threatened their entire town. Another recognized reporters and researchers joining together to field and confirm sickening stories of a creepy guy in a mall preying on teenagers, a man who looked to be the odds-on favorite to become Alabama’s next senator. Another prize-winner: the Alabama writer who confronted much of his audience to take a stand on that election.

Here are a few stories on the winners:

·        Kristen Hare reports on the Cincinnati Enquirer, which started covering heroin as a beat and ended up with 60 of its journalists intensely reporting a week of the city’s scourge — from multiple angles.
·        On his last assignment on his last day, the photographer who witnessed an indelible moment in the white nationalist Charlottesville protest called his award testament to local journalism’s power — but he’s moved on, to social media at a brewery.
·        After years of being overlooked, The USA Today Network (Gannett) takes three Pulitzers. Ron Edmonds reports.
·        An unlikely green light — two freelancers pitching a newspaper traditionally against comic strips — allowed for an affecting nonfiction story following a fleeing Syrian family, reports Ren LaForme.
·        Reuters took two awards, one of the Philippine strongman Rodrigo Dutarte and another, for photography documenting the massive purge by Myanmar of members of its Rohingya minority.
·        Oh, and perhaps the biggest winner of all, Kendrick Lamar, the first non-classical, non-jazz musician to be so honored. Said Journal-isms blogger Richard Prince, joyously: “It would as if James Brown had won a Pulitzer in 1970.” It’s about time, says the Washington Post’s Chris Richards: “Rap music is the most significant pop idiom of our time.”
·        The full list of Pulitzer winners and finalists. And celebrations

Quick hits

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Sean Hannity, who savagely critiqued the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer, has turned out to be a client of the lawyer himself. Why didn’t he disclose that to his viewers? That’s what Fox News’s Juan Williams asked on air. His Fox News collegue Shep Smith calls it “the elephant in the room.” It truly is a mess, writes The Atlantic’s David Graham. The Daily News put it simply, over much of its Tuesday front page, “Oh, For Fox Sake!”
THE EXCRUCIATING DEATH OF LOCAL NEWS: It’s profits first, news last,” writes Colorado news veteran Sandra Fish in the Daily Beast. “That’s bad not just for journalists, but for citizens who need a reliable source of information more than ever before in our democracy. Here’s a fired West Virginia editor’s advice for the Denver Post. (Hat tip: Neil Parekh)
YET, HERE’S WHY I’M GOING INTO IT: “I plan to tell stories for the rest of my life,” says Kiana Cole in a farewell column from the UNC’s Daily Tar Heel, where she has told them the last four years. (Hat tip: John Robinson)
REPORT FOR AMERICA: “People are applying for the same reason people want to go into the Peace Corps: There’s an idealistic desire to help communities, and there’s a sense of adventure,” Steven Waldman says. “They want to try and save democracy. People keep saying that.” (Hat tip: Connie Schultz)
SHE REALLY LIKED THE PLAYLIST: Her name was Suzanne. She wanted to remain anonymous. But the music-loving donor gave $10 million to KEXP, the alternative-indie music public radio station in Seattle, Nicole Brodeur writes. It really is an incredible playlist. (Hat tip: Hemal Jhaveri)
HE’S OUT:  Departed as chairman of Tronc, now Michael Ferro has made a deal to divest himself from the company. He sold his stake to a member of former owner Robert McCormick’s family, the Chicago Tribune reported.
BUILDING UP WIKIPEDIA: In nations like the United Arab Emirates, chances are slim that you’ll find answers to a general UAE question on Wikipedia. But this month, a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors launched the Wiki Loves Emirates campaign, trying to fix that. As Wikipedia grows, it hopes that its volunteer editors, know skewed toward North America and Europe, will become more representative of the world. (Hat tip: Andrew Lih)

​​​​​IN SELENA, THEY SAW THEMSELVES: That’s how Steve Saldivar’s story began on the 49th birthday of slain singer Selena Quintanilla. Saldivar was overwhelmed by responses to a Los Angeles Times callout on what the Mexican American star meant to them. For some, she represented a connection with parents, or she was simply the first person in media that looked like them. (Hat tip: Michelle Maltais)

What we’re reading

CHEMICAL ATTACK: Russia and Syria blocked international experts from heading to the site of the attack earlier this month. Meantime, Trump has backed down from his threats to increase sanctions on Russia for the attack. The most recent softening toward the Putin regime undercuts the U.N. ambassador, who pledged a tough U.S. reaction toward Russia, which supplies arms and mercenaries to keep the Assad regime afloat.
A REVELATION: What Alexa means for the blind. Writer Ian Bogost sees its effects on his dad, who could have used this a generation or two earlier.
ANOTHER UPSET?: No one gave a Democratic challenger much thought in a race for an open Congressional seat in a solidly Republican district in Arizona. Now it looks more like a toss-up, reports New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore.
ANIMATED INFLUENCERS: What comics have played a big role in evolving the genre, and leading millions of Americans imagine differently? From Superman to Smile, Mickey to ”Maus,” Vulture.com looks at the pictures, panels, and text that brought them to life.
DEAR WHITE AMERICA: Should I give up on you? asks George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory. “I am not a masochist,” he writes in the New York Times, “nor do I want to be a martyr.”

MARATHON MYSTERY: She finished second in the Boston Marathon. Nobody knew her. The 26-year-old Arizona nurse did it in only her second marathon. Wait, what? Turns out, Sarah Sellers was a runner in college who broke a bone in her foot. That kept her from running for years.
Spending time with like-hearted people vs like-minded people
Vrbov Rybnik a Spring on My granfather's land ... From visual journalist Fritz Schumann, a short, poignant documentary on Hoshi Ryokan, a Japanese hotel built on a hot springs that has been run by the same family for 1300 years, making it the oldest running family business in the world.
This ryokan (a traditional japanese style hotel) was built over a natural hot spring in Awazu in central Japan in the year 718. Until 2011, it held the record for being the oldest hotel in the world.
Houshi Ryokan has been visited by the Japanese Imperial Family and countless great artists over the centuries. Its buildings were destroyed by natural disasters many times, but the family has always rebuilt. The garden as well as some parts of the hotel are over 400 years old.
The ryokan is now on its 46th generation of ownership. As you might expect, the changing role of the family in Japanese society has put the future succession of the hotel to the next generation in jeopardy. (via open culture)


Knowledge@Wharton – David DeSteno - How Compassion Can Make You More Successful, Northeastern University psychology professor: “A couple years ago, Google’s HR department … [was] trying to figure out which teams were most successful. And their prediction going in was technical expertise [would be the key attribute for success]. But what they found is that the teams that actually had the most success … had a culture of empathy and compassion for each other.… It’s very rare that one person has all the skills. And so they have to be willing to support each other, to help each other, and it was a big determinate in success. Work by Wharton [professor] Adam Grant on these emotions shows the same thing. He did work with Francesca Gino [and] they looked at people who were working in call centers. … What they found is that when the managers actually showed gratitude for these people’s work, their efforts at trying to garner money — it was a development office for fundraising — doubled. And similar work Adam did with Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale School of Management showed that anticipating pride in your success, and having a culture where the managers reward that, also increases people’s productivity, but it also increases their resilience and lowers their stress…”

 Musk: "The Economist Used to Be Boring, but Smart With a Wicked Dry Wit. Now It’s Just Boring (Sigh). Tesla Will Be Profitable & Cash Flow+ in Q3 & Q4, So Obv No Need to Raise Money.…"


A quick glance at Finland’s successful solution to homelessness: giving homes to homeless people.
↩︎ The Guardian
A study of Anaheim, home to Disneyland, shows the social and economic costs of becoming a one-company town.
↩︎ Governing

Murder is concentrated: 80% of violent killings in Latin American cities occur on just 2% of the streets.
  ↩︎ The Economist

 Movie poster designer Midnight Marauder picks his all-time favorite movie posters.
 ↩︎ MUBI
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